Taylorism in the Mines? Technology, Work Organization and Management in British Coalmining before Nationalization

Taylorism, and the scientific management movement that emerged initially in the United States from the end of the nineteenth century, grew out of the trend towards ‘systematic management’ of the 1880s and 1890s. Investment in larger and more technically complex factories generated new management problems of coordination and control that prompted, in turn, innovations in cost accounting, inventory control and production scheduling.1 Frederick Winslow Taylor applied and refined a number of these techniques and added new ones. His ‘system of scientific management’ can be interpreted as a system of labour control based on work study that addressed the management of production as a whole.2 In addition to time-and-motion studies and rate-fixing, it embraced ‘the routing of materials, tools, etc., and the planning of production, the running and maintenance of machinery, a series of functional foremen, and, in overall control, a central Planning Department’.3 As such, it entailed changes in management’s own organization and procedures, the insertion of new management functions, and a new division of responsibilities that stripped powers from the traditional supervisor on the shop floor.